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Zoom out: here is service design

Service design asks you to look at everything around the screen: the letter before it, the counter beside it, the helpdesk after it. Between 2019 and 2021 I taught service design to some organisations, and assisted them in looking for ways of implementation. Here’s my conclusion: It is a good way of looking and a poor way of building.

Geert Valère AllegaertOctober 2026looking back on 2020

Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking.

Rebecca Ackermann, MIT Technology Review, 2023

In February 2021 my assignment, at a large IT organisation in the public sector, was to explain service design to everyone: project managers, designers, developers, business analysts, HR. Four hours on a video call, in Dutch and in French, several sessions. I had done the same work for almost two years at another administration, so I knew the subject. I also had some resistance to the assignment, and it took me a while to work out why.

The definition is short. A service is whatever helps someone get something done: move house, claim a refund, register a student job. Service design looks at that whole stretch from the person’s side, and at the staff and systems behind it. The British government’s manual says it most plainly: end to end, front to back, and across channels, meaning “phone, post and face to face as well as digital”.

So it is wider than designing a website. The website is one stop on the way.

A field that keeps being new

The idea is older than the web. In 1982 G. Lynn Shostack argued that services should be designed as deliberately as products. In 1984 she gave the method its first drawing, the service blueprint: every step the customer takes on one line, and everything the organisation does to make it happen underneath. Livework, the first consultancy to sell service design under that name, opened in London in 2001. The Service Design Network followed in 2004, the Double Diamond around the same time, and the textbook everybody quotes in 2010.

The best record of what happened next is one man’s collection of links. Peter Bogaards has gathered links on design at InfoDesign since 1997, by hand. Service design got its own category there in June 2008, eleven years in, and the first entry calls it “a new holistic, multi-disciplinary, integrative field”. The entries that follow are a field working out what it is: Figuring out Service Design, Detangling the meanings around the design of services, Why is service design so heterogenous?

The two words were also already in use. In January 2009 Mike Kuniavsky had to pull the meanings apart: from the technical perspective a service is “an atomic unit of functionality”, from the user’s “an atomic unit of activity”. A month later the same category holds a newsletter from an IT service management firm, under the very same heading. In thirty years I met the term several times, and each time I had to ask which one was meant.

And it kept arriving. In 2009 Peter Merholz noted that the term had succeeded in the UK and Europe “because there have been government-sponsored public sector service design projects”, while an American blogger published Abandoning Service Design. In 2012 Chris Downs, one of the founders of Livework, was asking Service design: Are we still talking about this? A year later an analyst at Forrester introduced it as the most important design discipline you’ve never heard of.

The category stops at the end of 2019, and one of its last entries is a maturity model for embedding service design across whole organisations. That was the wave I was in. Between 2019 and 2021, public administrations that had only just got used to UX found they needed this as well, and quickly.

What it sees that screen design does not

First its due. A designer who only draws screens is handed the problem already cut to size. Service design refuses the cut. On a journey around digital identity for that administration the login screen was the smallest part. What decided whether someone got in was whether they had an activated key at all, whether they lived in Belgium or abroad, which device they owned, and whether there was a counter they could walk to.

It also gives people who never talk to each other one drawing to point at. The sociologists Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer named that in 1989: a boundary object, “plastic enough to adapt to local needs” and “robust enough to maintain a common identity”. A journey map on a wall is one. In a large organisation it is sometimes the first time legal, the helpdesk and the developers have looked at the same thing.

Where it goes quiet

The course followed the standard shape: research, ideas, prototype, implementation. For the first three there was a diagram each. For the fourth I had to tell people that there is no double diamond for implementation, that it is harder to pour into a schema, and that it is up to the service designer to define it.

What I could give them was a list of what changes once a service is real: production systems, staff who were not in the workshops and do not necessarily believe in the result, every euro counted, and changes that are suddenly expensive. The method had a technique for every earlier step. For this one it had a list of warnings.

The textbook is candid about it too. Its library of fifty-four methods comes with the note that it “only contains building blocks” and does not say how to assemble them into a process. And looking back in 2023 on design thinking, the movement service design borrowed its workshops from, Rebecca Ackermann quoted San Francisco’s head of digital services, Cyd Harrell: the “biggest piece of the design problem” in government is not new ideas but working out how to implement and pay for them.

How much of it is proven

Less than the confidence of the teaching suggests, mine included. The Double Diamond is a diagram and not a finding. The Design Council, which drew it around 2003, says of it that “the simplicity in the symmetry of the diagram helped the introduction of the concept”. It is a teaching aid, and a good one.

In those years I also liked to open on the line that effort is the strongest indicator of customer loyalty. It comes from a 2010 Harvard Business Review article based on more than 75,000 people, all of whom had contacted a company’s customer service, written by the people proposing the score that measures it. It is evidence about contact centres.

What I use from it now, on small websites, fits in seven lines.

The parts worth keeping

  • Ask what happens before and after the screen. An invitation, a letter, a confirmation mail, a phone call when it fails. Most of what goes wrong is there.
  • Draw one journey for one person. A map for everybody describes nobody. On a project called Student@Work we planned for students and employers, and forgot the parents who turned out to be reading too.
  • Watch instead of asking. People who could not finish a task will tell you it went fine.
  • Put a name on every low point. A dip in the journey that nobody owns stays where it is. Identify dips and treat them.
  • Fix the time before you start. In one project we cut the method down to six steps and a fixed budget, built around one week of drawing and testing.
  • End on a ranked list. The result of a journey is an updated roadmap: pieces of work scored for value and effort, the quick ones first.
  • Plan the rollout as its own job. The people who have to run the service were not in the room. They are the next audience.

A way of looking

At the time I told people that service design is not really a methodology but rather a mentality. I meant it as praise. I now read it as a fair description of the limit: a mentality does not come with a plan, and you still need one.

I taught it, people used it, and what stayed with me is the habit of asking what happens before the page and after it. For a small website that is just one question.

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